Preparing a T-Shirt for Silkscreening

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right, so here's one of my t-shirts and this is just your standard cotton/poly mix t-shirt. With fabric painting, you can print on most fabrics just keep in mind that the smoother the fabric is the more likely you are to get like a really nice crisp image. I mean you can print on things like you know denim and canvas and you know, gosh, I guess you can print on anything, corduroy if you wanted to. But, I mean, the smoother the fabric is the better the ink is going to go down and kind of the crispier image you'll get, okay. So the first thing I'm going to do is this is just--or actually this just happens to be a kind of a garbage--a big paper garbage bag and I'm just going to put this inside the shirt here--but you know you don't have to use this you can use a piece of cardboard, just something kind of flat. And the purpose of this is to--is just so that the screen ink isn't going to go through the front of the shirt and transfer it to the back of the shirt because you know sometimes you put the ink on too wet and, that's not necessarily a problem but you know, you don't--you want to kinda keep the ink where you want the ink which is on the front part of the shirt. So I have this inside the shirt now and I'm just kind of squaring it up so that, you know, I definitely don't want any wrinkles in the shirt. Anyway you want to kinda get it centered and you have to kinda pull and push it around till it kinda feels right, there we go. So here, okay make sure we're on the front--I mean you don't have to print in the front but I'm going to print on the front, here's the tag so that's the back, here is the front, okay. Now if you want to get really picky about it now the next thing you want to do is figure out exactly where you want your image and you know I'm not too picky. Normally with screen printing they put the image in the upper half of the shirt right, so not so much down here but kind of up here, you know, just kind of keep it in kind of the upper half of the shirt. Even if you had just one image and you think that you want them in the middle of the t-shirt, you know if you put an image right in the middle of the shirt visually it actually would put that image kind of closer to your belly and most you know shirt, the images are across the chest and so that's why you kinda keep it in the upper half of the shirt. So I'm going to kinda move this in the center of the table. Here's the screen and what I want to do is just place it with the flat side of the screen down, right, I want that screen to contact the fabric, and then I'm just going to kinda you know look and kinda position it till I think it's where I want it to be. I mean I'm just going to do this by eye, you know, like I said I'm going to kinda keep it in sort of the top part of the upper half of the shirt. And there we go and that looks pretty good so I'm going to get some ink on this thing and try and pull the screen and see what it looks like."